


To Bury A Friend

by kabokie



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: All Platonic - Freeform, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Death, Dissociation, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, at least i think, this is just sad and more sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 17:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21039836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kabokie/pseuds/kabokie
Summary: A life without Jaemin wasn’t a life at all.—Renjun finds Jaemin clinging to life in an alleyway and he isn’t quite sure how to deal with it.





	To Bury A Friend

**Author's Note:**

> yes, the title is from billie eilish’s song. im not creative. also, i dont know how to write happy things, so here you go.

As Renjun watched the lifeless body be wrenched from his grasp, slowly stiffening limbs being maneuvered out of his white knuckled death grip, he wondered what the hell he’d done. He wondered what the hell his best friend had done to deserve this. 

Jaemin was smiling less than twenty-four hours ago, laughing at his own stupid jokes and playfully pestering their friends. He radiated happiness, the contagious kind that even Renjun often found himself catching. The previous day, he was holding Jaemin’s hand by the Han river. It was warm just as it should have been. 

And now it was just cold. Cold skin and blank eyes and an unmoving chest with lips stuck in a permanent frown. Sticky blood coating his abdomen, also turning cold. 

Those eyes that sparkled with mirth when he was amused, that shone with unshed tears when he was upset, would never open again. Those lips that smiled like the sun and the moon and all the stars in the sky combined would never rise again. And now they were taking him away forever, and Renjun would never see his best friend again. 

It was that terrifying thought, the realization that he would have to keep living without Jaemin by his side, that made his knees buckle from under him. He crashed to the concrete and felt the skin tear beneath his weight, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the body being loaded into the back of the ambulance, growing further and further from Renjun’s reach. 

The pain in his knees was just a fragment of the agony Jaemin had been through. He couldn’t even imagine the feeling of a knife tearing through his abdomen, ripping through the lining of his stomach. If Renjun wasn’t already shuddering, just the thought would’ve caused him to. 

How long had he been left to bleed out?

Renjun had been looking for the boy for almost half an hour. He hadn’t come home at the usual time, and it was getting a bit too dark outside for Renjun to be comfortable with. The older boy had waited twenty minutes before texting him. When he didn’t get a response, he called. When he didn’t respond again, Renjun slid on the first pair of shoes he found and left the apartment. He made the mistake of not informing their roommate of where he was going, but he thought it would be fine, because he was going to come back ten minutes later with Jaemin, right?

Renjun had walked down the streets they used daily, past the closest convenience store, past the cafe Jaemin always got his coffee from. Nothing. He wasn’t in any of those places. Still, no text messages. 

It was when he started retracing his steps back towards the apartment, this time searching with much more diligence, that the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach had finally hit rock-bottom. 

There, at the back of an alleyway, laid a crumpled body. 

A hand on his shoulder made him flinch, a voice asking if he wanted to ride in the ambulance with them, but nothing was making sense. The words were foreign syllables that held no meaning, but he was positive they were speaking Korean. His brain felt like it was melting in his skull and sloshing around until it was the only thing he could hear. Then he was being helped up and guided into the ambulance, and his eyes never once left Jaemin’s face.

People rushed around the boy’s body, starting an IV drip and hooking him up to multiple machines like they were actually going to do anything. Renjun had seen the wound, had seen the blood that pooled in thick puddles on the concrete. No one survived that amount of blood loss. The heartbeat on the monitor was weak but still _there_, and he wished he could have a little hope that his best friend could push through and survive by some miracle, but Renjun had always been misfortunate and he just knew that it was hopeless. 

After a long moment, a moment that probably wasn’t quite as long as it felt, Jaemin flatlined. Just like that, chaos erupted. 

Besides his own muted hearing and the cold blood soaking his jeans, everything that had happened after that was beyond him. 

—

He was sat in a chair in the hospital’s waiting room when his senses began to involuntarily return. The boy’s eyes were still locked onto the same part of the walls, staring so endlessly that his eyes dried up. There was a clock ticking above his line of vision, showing it was somewhere around midnight. He could eventually register the churning of his stomach at some point, and next was the ache in his knees. 

Renjun didn’t know how he got there. In fact, he was so alarmed over his lack of memory that it sent a wave of anxiety crushing his chest, quickening the pumping of his heart, squeezing his airway tight.

What had happened to Jaemin when he was out of it?

The memory of the heart monitor flatlining rose back up and- oh, right, he was dead long before. It wasn’t as if anything worse could’ve happened. 

The clock’s ticking was a little too loud in his ears now. He also wanted to sock the woman across from him in the face, who was noticeably staring at Renjun with the most pity-filled gaze. 

“Renjun?” 

He forced himself to release a breath at the sound of the familiar voice.

Renjun had managed to send his roommate a text through his stupor, though it was brief and enigmatic. He had never been so relieved for another person’s presence.

The boy’s head tilted up to find a shaken Jeno, face unhealthily pale and hands trembling around his phone. His hair was strewn every which way, shoe laces undone and shirtless beneath a zip-up jacket, and it was obvious he’d rushed over in a frenzy. Jeno stuffed the device into his jacket pocket and ran a hand through his unkept hair, taking a moment to catch his breath. 

It made Renjun wonder how he must have felt, waking up in the middle of the night to a short text directing him to the hospital alongside the words “_jaemin is dying_ .” The shock probably hit him like a splash of cold water, the sudden realization that something terrible had happened to one of his closest friends. He must’ve been so heartbroken. He must’ve had more emotions running through him than the sludge between Renjun’s ears could even comprehend at that moment. Even if he did, though, he didn’t make a dramatic display of it, because he had always been the mature one among the three of them. 

Two of them. Whatever. 

Jeno knelt down in front of Renjun after getting a good look at the older’s appearance. Taking his hands into his own, the younger swallowed his nerves and leaned his forehead onto their joined hands. 

His hands were warm, a little sweaty. Nothing like Jaemin’s. 

Renjun finally blinked for the first time in what felt like forever when Jeno squeezed his hands. He absentmindedly wondered when the blood had been wiped from them. 

“No matter what happens, we’ll get through it,” the boy said resolutely, even as his voice shook. 

He wanted to believe that. He really wanted to, but his best friend no longer existed and it kind of felt like Renjun’s entire world was crumbling before his eyes. Every meticulously placed piece was falling apart and scattering in the wind, catching fire and turning into nothing but ash and-

And maybe this was the world telling Renjun it was finally time for him to leave as well. For that, he loathed the world and everything in it for involving the only person he couldn’t physically handle watching leave. 

Jeno was still clutching his hands, devastated eyes begging him to just _hang on,_ but Renjun felt nothing. He felt nothing when he thought of leaving the world behind, of leaving Jeno and all his friends. Because if Jaemin already left, it wouldn’t make too much of a difference if Renjun went along with him, right? 

Wasn’t everyone going to die eventually? What was a little earlier?

Yes. That was his plan. The doctor was going to bring them in, begin with an apology, and tell them Jaemin was gone in the most indirect way possible. Renjun was going to nod and pretend to be the mature and emotionally stable adult he would never be, and on the way home he would stop at the nearest pharmacy for a bottle of sleeping pills. Then he’d get to see Jaemin again, though maybe not in his own living body, but in an even greater place. 

Jeno wouldn’t be able to blame him for long.

Even as the trembles wracked through the boy’s hands with each tightening of his grip, Renjun could still see the compassion in his eyes. He was always too kind, too selfless. He always put everyone else first when he  should be worrying about himself. 

“I promise you, we’ll get through it.”

As much as Renjun hated himself for it, he would have to take advantage of that selflessness.

Jeno would forgive him some day, Renjun was sure. 

Some day.


End file.
